Egypt: one year on, the young heroes of Tahrir Square feel a chill wind

The Observer's foreign affairs editor covered the birth of Egypt's revolution in Cairo. Now, as one leading candidate quits the presidential race in despair, he returns to meet protesters fearful of the army's power and a possible deal with Islamists

A woman protests outside a Cairo court where a former minister was on trial. Photograph: Nameer Galal/Demotix

The statue of Tala'at Harb, the Egyptian nationalist and founder of the Bank of Egypt who died in 1941, is to be found in the Cairo square named after him, a short walk from Tahrir Square. A small, besuited, stocky figure in a fez, he stands atop a little plinth on a traffic circle where the honking cars go round.

Last Wednesday evening, Tala'at Harb found himself transformed into an Askar Kazeboon – a "lying military" screening; an open-air guerrilla broadcast of video clips of brutality by Egypt's military and security forces that activists insist state television rarely shows. Those organising the screening, which gathered a quiet crowd of around a hundred onlookers, had placed a megaphone beneath the statue's arm and stuck a handwritten sign on to his chest reading: "Where is freedom?"

On the plinth itself was taped a small, makeshift paper screen on to which the images were projected, fed from a laptop by a young man crouched beneath the statue: beatings, killings and arrests by the country's security forces that have taken place since the fall of the former president, Hosni Mubarak, under the auspices of the country's interim military rulers.

The Askar Kazeboon, scores of which have been put on by activists across the country, are a spectacle supplying one account of how Egypt's revolution has fared since Mubarak was deposed a year ago.

Such growing concerns over the military's continuing role were underscored yesterday when Egypt's reform leader Mohamed ElBaradei announced he was pulling out of the presidential race to protest at a lack of democratic progress.

The Nobel laureate, seen as a driving force behind the movement that forced former President Hosni Mubarak to step down, said the conditions for a fair election are not in place.

At a hastily arranged press conference, ElBaradei – a prominent political figure despite being regarded as unlikely to secure the presidency later this year – said the military rulers who took over from Mubarak have governed "as if no revolution took place and no regime has fallen".

Last week it was revealed that the military is planning its own emotional appeal to Egypt's people. On 25 January, Egypt's generals will attempt to cement their place in their country's history as "defenders" of the 18 days of revolution that began in Tahrir Square.

There will be fireworks and military parades, flypasts by the air force, and prize certificates dropped by air across all of Egypt's sprawling provinces.

This last component of the celebrations, critics allege, is cynically designed to persuade poor Egyptians to stay in their neighbourhoods rather than gather in the squares. All of it is intended as a reminder and an embodiment of a revolutionary slogan that has come to ring hollow over the months: "The people and the army are one!"

The two contrasting pictures of the generals' role in Egypt's unfinished revolution demarcate the frontier of the country's most powerful and unresolved conflict, between its old "deep state" that existed under Mubarak – the concentration of vested interests represented by the military – and those demanding a full transition to civilian government and an expulsion of the felool – literally the "remnants" of the regime.

It is a conflict that continues despite the culmination last week of the first, long, drawn-out stage of Egypt's electoral transformation with the third round of voting for a lower house which will pick an assembly to rewrite the country's constitution ahead of presidential elections.

And while that lower house will be dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, which secured 45% of the vote, and the ultra-conservative Salafist parties, which came second, the future role of the military in Egypt's politics is, perhaps, as big an issue as the much-discussed question of what Islamist government will mean for the country.

Last week the former US president-turned-rights-monitor, Jimmy Carter, expressed his own doubts, after a meeting with the country's military rulers, that they intended to give up all of their powers to a new civilian government. "My guess is that the military would like to retain as much control as possible for as long as possible, still accepting the results of the revolution and the election," he said.

It is an outcome that few predicted 12 months ago as the first military vehicles trundled on the Nile Corniche on the evening of 28 January, welcomed by anti-Mubarak demonstrators as saviours from the brutal violence of the police and state security.

But that was then.

In the months that have followed, for many at the forefront of the revolution the generals have come to be regarded with a deep suspicion and hostility. Critical bloggers and activists have been beaten, arrested and dragged before military tribunals. Some have been sent to jail, such as Maikel Nabil, who was sentenced in March to two years in jail for "insulting" the military and publishing "false information" by posting a blog questioning its role in the revolution.

Female protesters have been subjected to "virginity tests", sexually assaulted, stripped and beaten. And in December soldiers, for the first time, were used lethally against a wave of protests that had started in November as a response to the generals' attempt to insist on guaranteed secrecy for the military's vast budget from parliamentary oversight. That would have given the army the right to veto articles in a new constitution, and prorogue the country's new constitutional assembly.

The military's clampdown has ground on in recent weeks with raids on human rights organisations – including some US- and German-funded ones – which have slotted into the narrative pushed by the generals that unrest in Egypt is being fomented by "foreign hands". The legal pursuit – though now not through the military courts – continues of other high-profile activists it accuses of inciting trouble at the year's end.

Reminders of the events that shook Egypt a year ago – and continue to convulse it – are not difficult to find. Burned and now rusted cars still sit in the car park of the fire-gutted former headquarters of Mubarak's NDP party headquarters, between the Egyptian Museum and Kasr al-Nile bridge on the Nile Corniche. It was a building I saw go up in flames on the first Friday of the 18 days of street battles that led to Mubarak's fall.

A few minutes' walk away you see a testament to more recent clashes: the newly built concrete wall by the Cabinet Office on Mohamed Mahmoud Street, put up last year to block the narrow thoroughfare. I pass it when I meet Ahmed Salah, a leading revolutionary activist.

When I first met him a year ago his nose, broken on 25 January after he was arrested by police, was covered in a huge white plaster that covered half his face. When we last spoke by phone from London in November he was coughing up blood after being gassed in this same street during clashes with the army. He still coughs into a handkerchief and complains that his lungs have not been the same since being gassed.

Salah is ill at ease. Court proceedings have been threatened against him because, he explains, he attended a political training course run by the International Republican Institute in Dubai in 2010 – ironically also attended by members of Mubarak's own party.He has been denounced on television channels loyal to the remnants of the regime, accused of taking foreign funding to undermine the state – now the generals' favourite charge to level against opponents. His mobile number has been broadcast on TV too, leading to a stream of hate calls.

Like others in the core of Tahrir's revolution, he believes that the electoral process his country has witnessed – including the role of the main Islamist parties – has been co-opted by the military to ensure its continuing influence and privileges, not least their business interests cemented during the Mubarak years. But, like many, he questions whether the present push back against the revolution by the military and other institutions of the deep state shows its continuing strength or is rather evidence of its growing weakness.

"A hunter will tell you: wound a lion, and that is when it is most dangerous, when it knows it is going to die," he explains. "The Scaf [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] is cornered because of its mistakes over the economy, human rights – even, I would say, its acts of treason. They understand they only have one option and that is to kill the revolution."

While the Muslim Brotherhood may have won a popular mandate in the recent elections, he argues that the party has formed a "temporary alliance" with the generals. The outcome – as Carter suggested last week – might be a deal to protect the military's immunities and leave them in place to exert their influence over Egyptian political life as the military did in Turkey and continues to do in Pakistan as a powerful cadre of securocrats.

He believes that what will happen on the anniversary of the revolution later this month will be critical to the final outcome of the revolution with continued pressure being necessary to ensure full transition to civilian rule. For while the often divided revolutionaries in Tahrir Square may have struggled to emerge as a unified and coherent political force in the elections, the Tahrirists have played a different – and equally crucial – role in the last year.

Omar Ashour, a Cairo-born politics lecturer at Exeter University and human rights activist, has spent a large part of the past year in Egypt following events. At the end of last year he was one of a group who attempted to mediate a cessation of the violence during street battles in Cairo.

"The Muslim Brotherhood is politically more powerful than the Tahrirists, but Tahrir has the ability to make things happen," he says. He is more optimistic than Salah about the eventual outcome of the new electoral process, echoing what I hear from other analysts that, while the generals have been keen to be visibly associated with the new democratic institutions, it may be against their interests.

"There is an institutionalisation of the new politics and hope for change that is taking place. That is the greatest gift of the revolution," says Ashour. "On the sidelines clearly a lot of the security sector is still trying to undermine the revolution and trying to retain the status quo and their lifestyle. The anniversary on 25 January is going to be critical in defining the outcome."

For while the elections have inevitably been the focus of attention, what happens next will define the future of Egypt – a coming crisis of legitimacy. When the new lower house first meets on 23 January it will be asked to create a 100-strong assembly to draw up a new constitution prior to presidential elections now slated for June. It is around these issues – of what articles should be in the new constitution and what power the president should have – that the greatest potential for friction exists. The threat of tension exists not just between the revolutionaries and the Scaf, but also between the newly elected parties – including the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists – and the military. Both these parties have said they would like to provide a "safe exit" strategy for the generals.

However, the question is whether the generals are planning any kind of exit at all. Indeed, Amnesty International's annual report, which was published this month, suggested that despite the military's promise to protect protesters it has detained 12,000 Egyptian citizens and carried out abuses almost identical to the last days of the Mubarak regime, including tightening controls on the press and NGOs.

The same bleak picture is described by Heba Morayef, Human Rights Watch's Cairo researcher. If there is a difference, she believes, it is that under Mubarak, where authority was centralised, the regime analysed the potential domestic or international damage to itself from persecuting its enemies. Under the Scaf's competing generals, she believes, the state's abuses and responses – while very targeted – have become "unpredictable".

On the political front she believes that the coming battle will be over what power the new parliament and president have and how far the generals can be pushed out of politics. It is a contest which, despite their best efforts to avoid confrontation with the military, the Muslim Brotherhood cannot avoid .

"The generals have already tried to set preconditions over who is entitled to sit on the constitutional assembly, which was resisted. They still want to influence the outcome. The new battle will be over who has real political power," says Morayef

On Thursday, Carter suggested a potential way out of the impasse, although one unlikely to find any favour with Tahrir's revolutionaries, by granting the military a limited extension of special privileges under a re-written constitution.

As Adam Shatz remarks in an article on Egypt in the current issue of the London Review of Books – quoting Régis Debray – the counter-revolution is revolutionised by the revolution.

In Egypt today that cycle of revolution and resistance to it is a long way from being played out.